


I Will Burn the Heart Out of You

by orphan_account



Category: BBC Sherlock, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Romance, rating subject to fluctuation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-01
Updated: 2013-02-25
Packaged: 2017-12-03 14:08:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/699084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They were an explosive combination of conflicting realities; battling morals and lives so vastly different the chasm that separated them was near impossible to breach.</p><p>A series of short, unconnected Molliarty vignettes. Rating subject to fluctuation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Almost

**Author's Note:**

> Also on FF.net under same title and username.
> 
> Chapter rating: General Audiences  
> Chapter warnings: Emotional Manipulation.

He didn't need to have idle hands in order to be the devil's servant — if such a fellow existed. He did his best damning work when he was busy, and it had been a long time since he slept all through the night.

It was easy to find her through her electronic outcries for company.

Easier to ask her out to coffee. Even simpler still to charm her into a second meeting.

Good God (if He existed), she was ordinary. Plain. Mass produced in a warehouse and cookie cutter stamped into something so expect-able it was almost humorous. Almost.

She was a means to an end; a beautiful end that kept him awake at night and his thoughts drifting from the more mundane tasks about his criminal empire.

And yet, he enjoyed her company. She amused him. He hadn't known that good girls still existed; and yet here she was.

Here they were. Sitting on her couch and watching vapid television.

It had taken a lot of subtle coaxing, but she was leaned into him with his arm wrapped around her. It made his lips curl in bitter humor to be in such a protective posture.

As if he would keep her safe.

He was much more likely to be the downfall of this plain, ordinary little slip of a girl. He felt an unexpected slice of sorrow at the thought. She was so unsullied. It was a pity to ruin her downtrodden views of life further. She would probably be a morgue attendant her entire life. And also possibly alone. Pity. She would have made some man very happy with her sweet attentions.

His fingers tightened briefly on her shoulders, and she looked up at him quizzically, her hair tickling against his jaw. He smiled in a blank, but reassuring way, and loosened his grip.

It was strange; he was almost sorry that she would end up alone again; having gotten attached to him — a murderer —of all people.

Almost.


	2. Post Mortem

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Rating: T  
> Chapter Warnings: Major Character Death

"I can't explain.  
\- JM"

Molly assumed it had to be a wrong number — the first reasoning of which being that she didn't know any 'JM' (at least not to remember) and moving steadily on to the fact that she had absolutely no idea what the text was on about.

She returned her mobile to her pocket and thought nothing of it. She had a lot of work to do, and she didn't want to waste time on something trivial.

Her attention returned to the charts she was filling out, and she lost track of the time. Of course, it wasn't as if there were windows down here to help her know when night fell.  
She was often in late.  
But she enjoyed her work, and made no extreme efforts to avoid long hours.

However, she didn't expect to be disturbed once she had subconsciously noted that everyone else had probably gone home.  
Hence why she dropped her clipboard and jumped when she heard the smooth comment from the door.

"I was beginning to think you were ignoring me."

It was Jim.

But not the Jim she had gone out with. He wasn't nervous or amiable seeming.  
His casual clothing had been exchanged for a tailored suit —which she had to admit, somehow suited him better — and his posture was tight and coiled.  
He looked dangerous. Sleek and unremorseful.  
Panthers came to Molly's mind and she felt strangely afraid of this new man in front of her.

"Jim," she said softly. It occurred to her what the J in her mystery text must stand for, and that he might have seen her blog post.

_"Jim, are you reading this? I'm sorry we argued and I don't mind if you're gay or not but where are you? Please, I miss you and I'm worried about you!"_

He kept his eyes on the floor as he ambled towards her.

"I'm not gay, you know."

_"Why aren't you answering your phone? And why aren't you at work? Your manager's going mental! Please! Just get in touch! Let me know you're okay!"_

He passed a tray of medical tools, and his gaze flicked over them approvingly. Molly felt suddenly cold and vulnerable.

"I wouldn't mind if you were," was her shaky response.

He turned and paced back towards the door.  
"I didn't think I was anything, not along those lines."

Molly didn't know what to say.

He pivoted on his heel.  
"Are you afraid?"

She was unable to answer.

"You should be, Molly Hooper."  
He returned along his path towards her.  
He was between her and the door, her and anything she could use as a weapon.  
She was backed against the lockers with nothing in her hands but a clipboard as a man she realized she didn't know at all approached her.

He stopped mere inches from her and seemed to be considering her features intently.

"I did come for Sherlock. I won't lie about that." He said in a mild, conversational tone and looked up in the direction of the security camera.

His eyes returned to hers.  
"But look at you, waiting every day for someone to notice you. Spending time with cadavers of people you never met. Going home to an empty house and writing on the computer in hopes that someone will see you."

Her cheeks burned with embarrassment, even amidst the wash of worry over her situation. She would never have imagined Jim from IT to be someone terrifying, but this Jim was. He looked like someone who put the bodies on her table.

"Molly, Molly. Plain, overlooked, ordinary little Molly." He continued in a sing-song tone.  
"I almost wish things could have been different for us. But it would never have worked, not in any variation."

Molly managed a few words.  
"Who are you?"

He was silent a long while.  
"No one for you. You'll understand soon enough, Molly Hooper."

He turned, and walked to the door.

"Jim!"

He stopped.

"Can I do anything to help you?"

His head tilted back and he turned towards her, a cold smile accenting the next words he spoke.

"It's far too late for me, Molly."

He reached into his pants pocket, and began drawing something from it.

Molly screwed her eyes shut. He was going to kill her. She didn't know why, but she was sure that death was imminent.

She was wrong.

The gunshot echoed painfully in the confines of the room, the sounds of debris falling almost imperceptible in its wake.

Warm lips pressed to her forehead in an unexpectedly tender kiss.

When she stopped shaking and opened her eyes, the security camera was shattered, and Jim was gone.

A few weeks passed before the bodies of the two cleverest men she had ever known found their way to her tables.

She wept for both of them.


	3. The Final Problem

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Rating: Gen  
> Chapter Warnings: Feeelingsss

It was a game for them more than anything.

Which isn't to say either party enjoyed playing, but it was necessary for them now.  
So they played.

She pretended not to wait up for him, and that she didn't know he had made a key.  
He pretended he wasn't planning on going, and that he didn't worry about her on nights he was away.

She didn't tell him about the nightmares she had the nights he was gone, and he made no mention of the nightmares he committed during the day.

They spoke of nothing, acted completely businesslike.

But the way she nuzzled into his chest and his possessive arm around her waist said the opposite.

They were an explosive combination of conflicting realities; battling morals and lives so vastly different the chasm that separated them was near impossible to breach.

And yet, every night it permitted, Jim Moriarty; the consulting criminal, father of much of the bloodshed in London (if not all of England) found his way to the bed of Molly Hooper; a lonely morgue attendant from Saint Bart's hospital.

She went to bed around nine-thirty. She fed Toby, brushed her teeth, and slipped in between the sheets of her bed, wide awake.  
She wouldn't admit to waiting up for him, but she did.

He would come around midnight — sometimes earlier, sometimes later, sometimes not at all. She would barely hear the creak of the door, and Toby sitting up on the bed at the sudden noise.  
She tried every night to gauge how long it would take him to walk from the door to her bedroom, and every night his silent quickness surprised her.

They spoke no greeting as he undressed to his lowest layers and slid into the bed next to her, their bodies remembering the shape of each other and fitting together in the most natural way. His chest pressed to her back, they fell asleep to the syncopation of each other's breathing, embraced in impossible longing.

In the morning, when she woke up alone, the only evidence to spite the creeping doubts, the thought that it might have been a dream, was the lingering scent of expensive cologne on the other side of the bed.

As she would never admit to waiting for him, she also would never confess to the pangs in her heart when she woke up without him.  
Or the tears that dripped to her pillow.

Similarly, he would never give voice to the conflicted pain he felt when rising from her side or the hazy distraction for the first few hours as he tried to go about his sordid affairs without thinking of her, and failed.

For that was the real purpose of the game, this game of endurance.

How long could they, such opposing forces, such opposite magnetisms, draw closer together?

How long before their proximity caused them to explode apart, shattering them both in the process?

It was a game with neither victor nor prize.

And yet they played it all the same.

* * *


	4. Lullaby

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter rating: T  
> Chapter warnings: Creepy!Jim, some autopsy talk

"Jim? Jim we don't have to watch the movie if you're too tired…"

She thought I slept badly at night due to regret and shame. She never told me that's what she thought, but I knew she did. She was painfully easy to read.

I slept badly because of the thoughts spinning in my head. Everything I'd seen that day — any day. All the knowledge, all the facts. Coming out at night to play.  
I slept badly because I was planning how to extort money, cause panic, hurt people. I slept badly because I got too excited about my work to sleep.

I didn't correct her assumption.

"…Jim?"  
"Tell me how you do a Post Mortem, Molly." I said, and crossed my ankles on top of the arm of the couch I was stretched out on.

"I, uh…what?"

I opened my eyes and gave her a playful smile.

"Pleeeaaase?"

She looked flustered, and fiddled with her hands in her lap a little.  
I knew she would, eventually.  
She cleared her throat, hesitated, and began.

"Well, um, after the evidence-gathering bits; cleaning under the nails and the like, and the body is undressed and washed and documented, we do an incision from each shoulder to the bottom of the sternum, and then down the abdomen to the pubic bone."

I closed my eyes. Strange, for such a sweet thing to be working with death, but she enjoyed it.  
Like I did.

But for different reasons, of course.

She hated for someone to go unclaimed, no one to mourn them. To her, anonymity was the worst possible fate in death. Understandable, given her solitary life.

Often, I put those sorts of bodies in her morgue.

We didn't talk about that.  
But, I had to admit I loved the idea that she was the one who tidied up things. Almost as though she was redeeming what I had done.  
Not that I have any mistakings about the state of my soul, or that anything she could do would ever redeem me.  
I liked that, too.

"— remove the organs in order, well, er, depending on what it seems like the cause of death might be."

Most times I fell asleep in the middle of business, as Moran drove me somewhere or I furiously wrote plans before they were lost from my mind as new information filled its place.

I know the aftermath a death causes, but this was one I didn't often see.  
And to hear sweet Molly explaining the cleansing of a body, erasing and memorializing a life at once.  
Preparing the gateway to oblivion.

She couldn't possibly know how soothing it was.

I usually fell asleep out of pure exhaustion.  
But this time, I was lulled softly into it by tales of death coming from the mouth of a saint.  
Breathtaking, that.


	5. I wash my hands of you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter rating: T-M  
> Chapter warnings: Seriously creepy!Jim, Murder talk, murder fantasy, violence

He was washing his hands when she flicked on the light.

"I thought it must be you."

The water, variegated with red, streamed steadily down the drain. Jim found it mesmerizing, in a bittersweet way. He had always liked the way the blood stained his fingers, clung to his hands; tried to be a shaming reminder.  
It couldn't have known how much contentment he found in seeing it outline his fingerprints, nails, and palms in the fading life of another human being, one who had been living mere minutes before. But they weren't anymore, and his hands were the last thing they knew.

Which was kind of beautiful, really, if you thought about it in the right way.

Molly never did was the problem.

"It's three in the morning, Jim."

He scrubbed the last of the murder from his hands and turned to look at her, flicking the water from his fingers.

"Hello, Molly."

She brushed a few strands of hair out of her face and blinked at him sleepily.

Jim had done quite well tonight in finding a doppelganger.  
The hair, the body type, the shape of the face. They were right.

But the voice was wrong, oh it was all wrong.

He tried to make it right— operating on her throat– but it didn't work. She screamed so loud, he couldn't bear it. He wanted her to speak quiet and gentle but she wouldn't stop _screaming_ and it was so wrong, she ruined the illusion.  
In the end he just squeezed the voice out of the body that was so right, squeezed out the body and her life in the same moment.

He always thought it would help, and he tried so hard. Find someone like her, and maybe the urge will fade, maybe this time it will be different, this time it will ease.

It never did.

She brushed her hair out of her eyes, and he wanted to watch those eyes mist over with his being the last image to flash across her mind. And her hair, _her hair_ , what would it be like, in the water; twining around his wrists as he held her under, watching her breath break on the surface and those eyes, her _eyes_.  
They were really what got to him, every time he saw her.

He wanted to drain the innocence right out of those eyes.

It was so difficult, whenever he saw her. So difficult not to kill her.

"What are you doing here? I mean, er, of course you're welcome but—"

Jim took quick strides across the kitchen and kissed her on the cheek— _oh but what if he curled his arm around her and held her against himself, what if he slipped out the knife he had used so recently on the girl that was not Molly and slipped it in between her ribs? Would she scream, or would she remain this quiet girl who didn't mind that a murderer had broken into her flat?_

"Couldn't sleep," he said as he brushed past her towards her bedroom.

"Jim, I— well… Do you think you'll sleep better here?"

He smiled wryly at her.  
"No. But I've got you here, love."

Being with Molly was a continuous struggle, no matter the circumstances.

But Jim didn't mind.


	6. Cause of death

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Rating: T  
> Chapter Warnings: Autopsy talk, major character death, general creepifying, feels

COD: Asphyxiation.  
  
It was clear what had happened; the victim’s neck was bruised in varying degrees of red, blue, purple. It would have been beautiful were it not the hand prints of a strangling, but perhaps as an abstract artwork with colors that faded and blurred together.  
  
The eyes had been closed, hair combed, corpse redressed.  
  
It was a little unnerving how peaceful he looked, lying on her table with the life squeezed out of him.  
  
It had seemed so routine, until she noticed the careful inscription on the inside of the wrist.  
  
She mentally began analyzing it for cataloging. Ballpoint pen, blue. Even lettering with distinct tilt to the left.  
Then it hit her what it actually said.  
  
“Hello, Molly.”  
—-  
COD: Gunshot to the head.  
  
The victim was female, as yet unidentified. Mid twenties, 5’6”, 152.4 pounds.  
  
A single bullet hole was all that marred her features. She looked calm, staring at nothing with clouding eyes.  
  
Molly wondered if she’d had a boyfriend — there was no ring on her left hand. What her job had been. The body had been dressed in casual clothing, but it seemed clear it had been redressed. There was no knowing what she did. She snapped photographs of the bullet wound, and began pressing the fingers to an ink pad, and then an identification card.  
  
She noticed something on the inside of the wrist, and had to stop before she turned it over.   
“I miss you.”  
—  
COD: Blunt force trauma to the skull.   
  
She ignored the fingerprinting for as long as possible, and then turned the wrist before doing anything else. She had done this with each corpse for weeks, dreading another message. Her stomach felt tight and roiling when she saw the telltale handwriting.  
  
“Me, missing you. Imagine that.”  
—  
COD: Punctured lung due to fractured rib.  
Identity: unknown  
Male. Teens. 5’10”. 145 lbs.  
  
It had been weeks since the last, but she no longer jumped when she realized the body held a message for her, directly from the killer.  
  
“I know better than to flatter myself that you do the same.”  
  
—  
COD: Overdose of prescriptions.  
Identity: Sloane, Eliza  
Female. 50's. 5’4”. 212 lbs.  
  
All doubt of whether it was accidental, suicide, or homicide was eliminated when she read the latest message, penned in blue, fading ink, on the inside of the wrist.  
  
“But I still find myself wondering.”  
—  
COD: Sharp force trauma to the skull.  
Identity: unknown  
Female. 74. 5’3”. 102 lbs.  
  
“It’s a little laughable, that.”  
—  
COD: Decapitation.   
Identity: unknown  
Male. 56. 6’1. 165 lbs.  
  
“But you always could make me laugh.”  
—  
COD: Axsanguination   
Victim: Jones, Jeffrey  
Male. 9. 4’2. 95 lbs.  
  
“I wish I could do the same for you.”  
—  
COD: Severed jugular.  
Victim: Prisilla, Dian  
Female. 43. 5’10”. 172 lbs.  
  
“But it doesn’t really matter now, does it?”  
—  
COD: Suicidal gunshot wound to the head.  
Identity: Moriarty, James.  
Male. 36. 5’8”. 140 lbs.  
  
“I’m sorry.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't even know how I got on this ship and dang, it hurts.

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: I hate how much I ship this, honestly.
> 
> Thanks for reading!  
> Eternal props to the loverly Corscopa who beta reads all me fics.


End file.
